


Thriving

by Seefin



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Hogwarts Eighth Year, M/M, POV Draco Malfoy, Post-Hogwarts, Summer, brief mention of Harry on a motorcycle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-28
Updated: 2018-06-28
Packaged: 2019-05-30 02:26:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15086999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seefin/pseuds/Seefin
Summary: Draco’s parents had been young when they’d had him; in their early twenties and in love, looking for a blonde baby that looked like them, who would be sweet and well behaved and charming, just as they were. He had been born on a sweltering day not far into June, early in the morning as the sun was rising, the nameDracoalready long picked out for him.





	Thriving

Draco’s parents had been young when they’d had him; in their early twenties and in love, looking for a blonde baby that looked like them, who would be sweet and well behaved and charming, just as they were. He had been born on a sweltering day not far into June, early in the morning as the sun was rising. The name Draco had already been long picked out for him.

His parents read him bedtime stories and taught him how to play Quidditch, and when he was old enough to know how, they taught him spells. Little ones; colourful sparks and tiny silver fish that would disappear when he tried to put his hand through them. His father lent him the wand he’d used when he’d been a child, and his parents had watched him in the study, in the garden, and laughed with him delightedly.

They had brought him to parties and he’d sat with the other children in the playroom, house elves watching over them. They had sent him to Hogwarts, where he did well but not exceptionally, and had never exceeded. They’d had a whole, sparkling life, and Draco had too, even though school had been odd and had made him angry and not that many people had seemed to like him. It had been fine, and things would have looked up when he’d got older and had grown out of being a bully, and his life would have carried on. It would have turned out like theirs.

Draco’s parents had found him after the Battle and had been happy that he was safe, since they loved him and he was their only son. They had gone back to the Manor together and Draco had stood in doorways and watched his father methodically destroy any evidence that Voldemort had ever been there. The Aurors turned up before he could finish.

 

\---

 

It turned out that Azkaban allowed visitors, and Draco had gone three times over the course of the summer while he was waiting for his trial to start. His father’s hair had been shorn, the first time he’d been there, and that’s all Draco could ever really remember about it. That, and the cold.

The second time, the whereabouts of his mother had been enquired after.

“Paris,” Draco had said, but it hadn’t come out properly and he’d had to repeat himself. “Paris,” he said again, clearer this time, and his father’s face had gone hard.

“Good,” he’d said, but it hadn’t sounded as though he thought it was good. “That’s for the best.”

Lucius hadn’t asked where Draco was living, the answer to which would have been: alone in the empty manor, unable to leave without express permission from the Auror department.

“Have you heard anything from the Notts,” his father had said, the final time Draco had visited. His face had been thin and pale, and the room had been damp. Draco had sat for hours in a freezing, black waiting area before being let into the visiting rooms, and the hem of his too-long trousers were soaked from the journey up.

“No,” Draco had replied, startled. “Not-- no, Theo hasn’t contacted me. I’m not allowed to hear from people.”

His father’s face had been expressionless. “I don’t mean _Theo,_ ” he said, his voice like nothing Draco had ever heard. “I meant his father. Draco will you _think_ for once.”

Draco shook his head. “I don’t get why Theo’s father would try and talk to me. He’s on trial right now.”

Lucius had licked his lips, Draco didn’t know why he remembered that. “To get a message to me,” he grated out.

Draco had stared at him, and his father had stared back. “He’s dead,” Draco had managed, his voice weak. “Why are you still--”

“I thought he was dead once before,” Draco’s father had told him, and wavered in his seat. “And trust me, Draco, when I tell you that this place pales in comparison to what the Dark Lord would do if he knew I had renounced him for a second time.”

Draco hadn’t known what to say, so he hadn’t said anything. “Try,” his father said eventually. “For once, to be useful.”

Draco had left at the end of his allotted time, and he hadn’t gone back again when the Aurors had offered. And when Mr. Nott sent him an owl, somehow managing to get it past the wards, Draco hadn’t read it. He had given it to the Aurors who spent all their time in the kitchen, playing poker, and he didn’t know what they’d done with it or what it had said.

When Draco went back to Hogwarts for eighth year, Theo hadn’t been there.

 

\---

 

His first conversation with Harry Potter after the trial had gone like this:

Draco had already been in the library for half an hour when Potter came in, dumping his satchel down on one of the big tables across from Draco’s, slumping into his seat. He’d been silent for a long time, the library so quiet that Draco could hear Potter’s quill scratching on his parchment. He didn’t know why Potter had chosen a table so close to him, when it was a Sunday morning and the place was practically empty. He didn’t know why his whole body froze up any time Potter was near him, why his head started hurting, why his throat would always go dry.

After a little while, Potter got a glass bottle out of his bag and started to shake it, and then opened it over the table, where it fizzed over the rim and onto his work. He swore, and then did it again, but this time over the floor, drops splashing at his feet. He caught Draco looking, on about the seventh time.

“I hate it when it’s too fizzy,” he explained, as though that was supposed to mean anything at all.

“Okay,” Draco said, and turned back to his book, and proceeded to read the same paragraph fourteen times in a row without understanding a single word. Potter was still across from him, doing his whole routine. Draco could hear the liquid fizzing, the hiss when Potter opened the lid, could see Potter’s arms move out of the corner of his eye. He read the paragraph three more times, and then left.

After that, Potter started smiling at Draco when they passed each other in the corridors. Tentative, wary, as though he thought Draco might spring at him or claw his eyes out. Draco smiled back once, by accident.

 

\---

 

They didn’t talk again until after Draco went to Paris for Christmas, to stay in his mother’s apartment on the fourth floor of an old building, opposite a snow-covered park. The rooms hadn’t changed at all since the last time he’d been there, years ago now. Old houses like that rarely tended to change, Draco had found. The Manor -up until the Aurors had cleared it of everything even slightly interesting- had looked exactly the same for all the years of Draco’s life. His mother’s apartment was light, with tall windows and linen curtains and white walls that reflected the winter sun. The walls in Hogwarts seemed so close in comparison, the rooms so small, his dormitory so dark.

“How is your father,” Draco’s mother had asked over breakfast one morning, setting her piece of toast delicately down onto her plate.

“Fine,” Draco replied, swallowing a bite of croissant before speaking. He didn’t know if that was true or not. He didn’t know if they were working with the same definition of the word. Lucius had been talking, and even though he’d seemed thin it hadn’t been anywhere near as severe as the last time he’d come back from Azkaban. But Draco hadn’t spoken to him in months.

His mother pursed her lips. “He tells me you haven’t visited in a while.” Her tone of voice was completely neutral. She was being careful.

Draco looked at her. Some red lipstick had smeared onto the rim of the teacup she was holding in her hands. She always drank mint tea in the mornings, had for as long as he could remember. Her hair was starting to go grey. “He thinks Voldemort is going to come back again,” Draco told her. She flinched at the name.

“Things are very difficult for him,” she said, after a pause.

Draco looked at her some more. “I don’t want anything to do with it,” he said. Surely she knew that by now, that he didn’t have it in him. For a very long time Draco had assumed his mother knew everything that was going on in his head, which alternated between being intensely embarrassing and oddly comforting. Apparently that wasn’t the case, though.

She took a sip of tea, and then stood up. “Neither did I,” she said, “but when you make choices, you have to see them through.”

Draco shook his head. That wasn’t true. And it hadn’t been a choice, exactly. “I don’t want anything to do with it,” he said again. He tried to sound firm, but he was talking to his mother.

She turned in the doorway. The house elf was hovering in the hallway behind her, waiting to clean up after she’d left the room. “I know that you wanted to succeed in the task that he gave you,” she said. “And I’m sorry that you didn’t, I did everything I could to help you. You shouldn’t let one setback--”

“I’m glad that I didn’t,” Draco said abruptly, cutting her off. He felt cold, even though a fire was burning in the grate right beside him.

“You are,” she said slowly. She must have known that. She _must._

“Even if Voldemort wasn’t dead--” Draco said, sick in the pit of his stomach, and then found himself unable to continue. He picked up an apple from beside his plate, and started to twist out the stalk.

“Your father won’t--”

“Mother,” Draco said, interrupting her again. He looked down at his hands, then dug his thumbnail into the skin of the apple. A droplet of juice ran down his wrist and into the sleeve of his shirt. She had always insisted he dress properly for breakfast. “He’s in Azkaban.”

Draco ached to ask her what she wanted, now that it was over. He wanted to know if she would have been pleased if their side had won the Battle, if she had believed everything that Voldemort had said, the way Draco once had. He’d been so sure of all of it for such a long time, and then had only believed fragments of it, and now had no idea what he thought. Draco had wavered, and their whole side had fallen. There wasn’t any space in the ranks for people who weren’t sure. Draco knew that, and wondered if his mother did.

“I’m tired,” she said eventually. “I think I’m going to go and lie down for a little while.”

“Alright,” Draco agreed, and raised his head to watch her leave.

 

\---

 

Draco used to love going home for the holidays, almost couldn’t sleep with excitement over seeing the house all lit up from the door of his carriage, a candle flickering in every window, a huge bough of holly strung up above the front door. The manor used to be so beautiful, before his father invited the Death Eaters on some sort of corporate retreat, where most of the team bonding comprised of setting fires in the ballroom and practicing unforgivables on each other as a laugh. Most of the the rooms had been completely destroyed, even some of the hidden ones that only Malfoys were supposed to be able to enter. The staircase in the front hall was rubble; the curved bronze banister lying in one piece on the marble floor like a huge, dust-covered snake.

Draco went back there anyway, after seeing his mother in Paris and before going back to Hogwarts. It was empty now and he could walk into whatever room he liked, sit down at the piano he’d learnt to play on and press down on the soundless keys, go into his bedroom and not have to lock the door three times, ward it, push a chest of drawers against the back of the door just in case.

Gibney found him in the conservatory, looking up at the empty windows. The panes of glass hadn’t been changed since the house was first built, they’d been thick and warped and some had had tiny bubbles in them near the corners. On a hot day he’d come down here and lie in one of the wicker chairs, look up at them and think about the way they’d made sky look funny and odd-coloured.

“Master Draco,” she said, and when he turned around she was walking barefoot over the shards of glass.

“Stop,” he said, stepping towards her, and she froze, wide-eyed. “You’ll just-- hurt yourself,” he said lamely.

“It is dangerous to be in here,” she said, “I haven’t started cleaning this wing of the house yet, sir.”

Draco nodded, shoved a bit of glass around with his foot, and then reached down to pick it up. Gibney made a noise of protest. He slid it into his pocket. “Thank you,” he said.

“Dinner will be in the dining room sir,” she told him. “Whenever you are ready.”

“Okay,” he told her. “Are there any letters for me?”

She shook her head. She was still standing on a piece of glass, and he had the awful urge to pick her up and deposit her down on a patch of clear floor. Draco stayed where he was, though. “The aurors have been coming to take the mail,” she said. “Gibney doesn’t know if any were for master Draco or not.”

“Okay,” he said again. He’d forgotten that was still happening.

She made another odd noise. “Harry Potter came to the house,” she said. “The day before Yule celebrations.”

Draco blinked at her. “What?” he said. “Are you sure?”

She frowned. Which--Draco hadn’t meant to argue with her. “Yes,” she said. “He asked where you were but Gibney did not tell him.”

“Right,” Draco said. He could think of multiple reasons why Potter had come to the house, and none of them were any good. “Did he say what he wanted?”

Gibney shook her head. Her dress was looking a little worn, Draco would have to see about putting some extra money into her fund this month. “He didn’t want to leave a message, sir.”

“Right,” Draco said again, shell-shocked.

Gibney watched him for a moment. “Dinner will be soon, sir,” she said, and then apparated away. Draco nodded at the empty space where her body had just been.

Potter had come to his _house._ Draco couldn’t-- he couldn’t think why Potter would do that, if not to-- do something bad, say something bad. Maybe he wanted Draco to quit Hogwarts. But he’d been smiling at Draco in the corridors, in the eighth-year common room when Draco came in from his late Potions class. He’d even talked to him, in the library that time.

Draco left the conservatory and went to the dining room where his dinner was already waiting, on a plate under a heating charm at the head of the table, where his father had always sat. He ate his vegetable soup and thought about sending Potter a letter, but he didn’t even know Potter’s address. He doubted Potter was living in Grimmauld Place, even though Draco knew it had been left to him. That house was a festering hellhole.

Draco finished his soup, set his spoon down on the scarred surface of the table, and decided not to do anything at all.

 

\---

 

Draco went for a run the afternoon he arrived back to Hogwarts, when it was raining and the sun was still going down. Draco hadn’t been for a run before in his life, but it felt like the thing to do when one had just spent a difficult week with one’s mother and needed to clear one’s head. Most of Draco’s exercise came from Quidditch drills; the current Slytherin captain was a sixth year, tough and mean and impervious to pretty much all of Draco’s complaints about having to throw up or his mouth tasting like blood or his lungs not working. They were winning though for the first time in about three years, so Draco couldn’t even say anything bad about it. Even gossiping with his teammates about how brutal she was had lost most of its charm, now that they’d won their last six games in a row and there wasn’t technically anything to be annoyed about.

The path down to the Quidditch pitch was muddy and churned up, and Draco was out of breath when he arrived at the base of the eastern stand, covered up to his shins with splatters of dirt. A game was going on at the far end of the pitch; a kind of impromptu, messy-looking thing where none of the players were wearing uniforms. Draco rested his elbow up against the wet wood of the stand and watched for a moment, leaning his head onto his forearm and breathing hard. His head didn’t feel much clearer, and in fact had started to ache right around his temples, which was obviously complete bullshit and rather defeated the point of a run in the first place. All this had done was cake a significant portion of his legs in mud, which was going to be hell to get off in the slytherin showers, that had never once run hot since Draco had first arrived at Hogwarts.

Above him, one of the players did a nifty little corkscrew maneuver and lobbed the quaffle through one of the goal hoops. Draco had played against Ginevra Weasley enough times to recognise that move, even if her hair was all covered up by a grey hood. She yelled out, loud enough that he could hear it from where he stood, and then shrieked with laughter as someone rammed into her from the side as revenge, sending her rolling through the air. She righted herself quickly, dipping the front of her broom down towards the ground as she steadied herself, still laughing.

Some of the teams got funny about opponents watching in on practices, especially Hufflepuff, since pretty much their only advantage was to try and shock the other team for long enough to slip a goal past the keeper. This wasn’t an official practice, so Draco thought he was probably fine to stay, unless the Gryffindors had decided to implement a move where two of their chasers were getting into actual, physical fights with each other. Their keeper kept having to come out of goal to split them up, and Weasley scored four points that way just while Draco stood there and watched.

It got darker after a while and their play started to get worse as the light faded, the quaffle dropping to the ground a couple of times when their chasers fumbled. Draco was just about to leave when he heard someone approaching from his left, the sound of footsteps on the soaking ground.

“Hi,” Potter said, emerging out of the gloom like a spectre.

“Hello,” Draco replied, and then his brain pretty much completely shut down. He’d never felt less like having a conversation with someone in his entire life. Maybe Potter wouldn’t want to talk, and would instead punch him in the face. Draco thought that would be far preferable as long as he didn’t stick around for a chat afterwards.

“It’s freezing,” Potter said.

“What a delightfully incisive statement,” Draco said. “Good to hear you’ve still retained your sparkling wit.”

“Good to hear you’re still a prick,” Potter replied cheerfully. He smiled. It was truly unsettling.

“I have to leave now,” Draco told him. He hadn’t spoken to anyone except his mother in an entire week, and didn’t think he could be blamed for completely forgetting how normal people spoke to each other. Not that he and Potter were normal people, or capable of having a normal conversation, obviously.

“Oh,” Potter said, sounding oddly disappointed, although Draco was probably misinterpreting. “Are you going back to the castle?”

“Um,” Draco said, his voice sounding weird and strange and too high pitched. Usually when something terrible or odd happened, or when someone said something funny even though they’d not been trying, Draco was brilliant at making himself sound the way he usually did when nothing terrible or odd or funny was happening. This, though, this current conversation, was quite far beyond the boundary of anything Draco had had to deal with before.

“Yes,” Draco said eventually, because he could either lie about it and then head straight back to the castle, or he could lie about it and then lounge around out here covered in mud for a while until it stopped being a lie.

“Well,” Potter said hesitantly. “I could walk with you.”

“Oh,” Draco said, shocked out of his mind. He thought for a moment, but nothing came to him. “Alright then. I can’t think of a good enough reason to say no, so I suppose I have to say yes.”

Potter laughed, starting off in the direction of the castle, the windows all lit up in front of them golden and glowing.

“What were you doing out here?” he asked, and suddenly everything made complete sense. Potter clearly thought that Draco was spying, or up to no good, or something characteristically evil, and was here to keep tabs on him. Draco felt immediately comforted, as though he’d just picked up a book he’d read a hundred times. He already knew this conversation by heart.

“Oh nothing,” Draco said, as airily as one could when dressed in a sweat-stained t-shirt and trousers made entirely from rain and mud. “Just decided to go for a run, since it was such a lovely evening.”

They walked next to each other up the path, and Potter turned his head to look at Draco as though he thought Draco might not notice. “Do you-- like running, then?” he asked.

“I actually only took it up half an hour ago,” Draco informed him. “And I have to say that I don’t think I’ll be partaking again. You don’t need leg muscles for Quidditch anyway, I’ve always thought.”

“They’re pretty important actually,” Potter said, painfully, embarrassingly sincere. Draco wanted to melt into the ground. Draco wanted to become the rock he’d just trodden on, just so he could get out of this talk. “Did you see they’ve got a rowing machine in the exercise room now?”

Draco did not know how to respond to that question, and instead sighed. “How was your Christmas?” he asked. He was beginning to think maybe his first assessment about the purpose of this conversation had been wrong. He was beginning to think Potter genuinely just wanted someone to talk to.

“It was good,” Potter said, and then laughed again. He did not choose to share the joke he’d just had with himself.

“Good,” Draco echoed. “Good. Mine was fine, thank you, I spent it with my mother.”

“At-- the manor?” Potter asked, and then visibly shuddered, which Draco felt was an overly strong reaction. Anyway, Potter already knew he’d not been at the manor. But apparently they were both pretending that hadn’t happened.

“No,” Draco told him. They were coming up close to the castle now, thankfully. He was starting to shiver. “My mother lives in France now, in our place in Paris.”

“Was it nice to see her?” Potter asked.

Draco sighed again. “Not particularly,” he said. “But she is my mother, so one mustn’t be too harsh on her.”

“No,” Potter agreed, mouth twitching, wide eyed. “One mustn’t.”

Draco turned to him and then narrowed his eyes. Potter paused at the base of the stairs that led to the main door of the castle, one foot on the bottom step. “Are you making fun of me?” Draco asked.

“I-- no,” Potter said hurriedly. Draco narrowed his eyes a bit more. “Yeah yeah, alright,” Potter said, rolling his own.

“Why all the friendly camaraderie all of a sudden?” Draco asked. “I feel uncomfortable with friendly teasing when it doesn’t come from an actual friend.”

Potter made a face. “That’s rude,” he said, and then stopped talking.

“I thought we were enemies?” Draco said. Potter flinched, as though he hadn’t expected Draco to come right out and say it. “What happened with that?”

“The war’s over,” Potter muttered.

“What makes you think I’m not wet for another one?” Draco asked.

Potter grimaced. “Fuck,” he said. “That was vivid. Don’t think I needed that, actually.”

“Oh you get my point,” Draco said exasperatedly, rolling his eyes. “Don’t be a baby about it.”

“Wet,” Potter repeated, laughing a little. He pushed a clump of wet hair out of his eyes. “Jesus.”

Draco took a deep breath. “I’m going to go and shower,” he said. “This was lovely, thank you ever so. Are we best friends now?”

“Come on,” Potter said. He started walking up the grey steps, dark with water. “I just-- nobody else ever talks to you.”

“Oh _Merlin,_ ” Draco said, stopping in his tracks. He’d accidentally started following Potter when Potter had told him to. “Are you being serious?”

Potter shrugged, didn’t turn around. “You look like you need a friend.”

Draco passed his hand across his face, closed his eyes for a brief moment. This was why Potter had appeared at his house when Draco hadn’t been there. He thought Draco would be _lonely._ Draco’s life was completely farcical. “Right,” he said. “Okay. Good. Right. No thank you, on that offer, but thanks. But no thanks.”

Potter turned around at the top of the steps, the huge front door swinging open silently behind him, all warmth and light and the smell of the first-night-back dinner that Draco hadn’t attended. “Malfoy,” he said, toneless.

“Did you forget I didn’t like you?” Draco asked him.

“You don’t know anything about me,” Potter said. Coming from anyone else it would have sounded to Draco like a line. A bad one, one he would have laughed at. Coming from Potter though, it only sounded true.

“You can’t just-- tell someone you’re going to be friends with them now and then expect them to actually become your friend, just like that,” Draco said. He didn’t quite know why he was protesting, anymore, but it was probably out of principle.

“We play Quidditch every Thursday,” Potter said. “Well. I don’t. But there’s a pick-up game. You should come.”

“ _No,_ ” Draco told him. “What makes you think I want to play Quidditch with your boring friends who all absolutely hate me, and whom I all absolutely hate.”

Potter shrugged. “Are you coming in for dinner?” he asked, backing up in the direction of the door. “You didn’t tell me about Paris.”

“Piss off!” Draco said, almost wanting to laugh. He could probably find some other way into the castle, a way not currently blocked by Harry Potter’s solid form. He thought he remembered something about a partially blocked staircase that led from the shore of the Great Lake down to the dungeons. Partially blocked by water, admittedly, but Draco had overcome worse. “We aren’t even allowed to sit at the same table, you prat.”

 

\---

 

“Are you actually wet for another war?” Potter asked him, a few days later when they were both in the library again. Draco had been trying to avoid him by hiding in the Potions section, to no avail.

“Can you shut up?” Draco hissed. “Haven’t you ever heard of a library voice?”

“You’re making that up,” Potter said. He took a red-spined book down off the shelf and flipped it open.

“I’m not making that up,” Draco whispered. “Just because nobody’s ever thrown the chosen one out of a library doesn’t mean the rest of us are immune.”

“I’ve been thrown out of a library,” Potter said. “Loads of times. “I’ve been thrown out of _this_ library. Also I don’t think that sentence really made sense.”

“Please fuck off,” Draco pleaded. “You’re not even doing Potions.”

“Yes I am,” Potter said, looking up at him from the book. “I’m in with the fifth years.”

“Oh,” Draco said, and then smiled. “That makes me feel really brilliant for some reason. Thank you for telling me that. I mean it.”

Potter ignored him. “Oh my god,” he said, looking at the book in horror. He flicked over to the next page. “In what world would you need this?”

Draco tilted the book down with one fingertip so that he could read the chapter title. _Liquids into blood_. “Well,” he allowed. “It’s probably more academic than anything else.”

“Milk into blood,” Potter said, and the turned over a whole chunk of pages, wincing at what he found. “Paper into blood. What is this. What’s happening.”

Draco plucked it out of his hands and put it back on the shelf. “Far too advanced for sixth years, I’m afraid.”

Potter flipped him off. “What were we talking about?” he asked.

“I don’t remember,” Draco told him, even though he definitely did. “Can you leave now? I’m incredibly busy.”

“You don’t actually want another war, do you?” Potter asked.

Draco moaned, but quietly, because he’d never been thrown out of a library and didn’t intend to start now. “Of course not,” he said. “If I wanted that do you think I’d be here getting my fucking Potions NEWT? No, I wouldn’t, I’d be off in a cave somewhere plotting your downfall.”

Potter made a face, one so mournful that Draco almost wanted to feel sorry for him. It was gone as quickly as it came, though. “I don’t think I’m that important anymore now that Voldemort’s dead,” Potter said cheerily. Draco swallowed hard over a lump in his throat.

“No,” Draco agreed. “I suppose not.”

“It’s kind of a relief,” Potter confessed.

“Why are you telling me this?” Draco asked helplessly.

“Well,” Potter said slowly. “The war’s over, you know.”

“Stop saying that,” Draco snapped. “I know the fucking war’s over. We hated each other for a long time before the fucking war broke out, you complete fool. Remember when I tried to get that horrid hippogriff put down? Remember that time I broke your nose?”

“Didn’t that second one happen after the war had broken out?” Potter asked, but he wasn’t looking at Draco.

Draco stared at him, looked back at the shelves, stared at him again. “I don’t understand,” he said, quiet. “Why you would even want to talk to me. That’s what I’m trying to ask you, I don’t know if you noticed.”

Potter rubbed at his eyebrows with one sharp knuckle, his mouth gone all twisted. “I dunno,” he said. “I don’t want things to be like they used to be.”

Potter couldn’t have had things the way they’d used to be even if he’d wanted, Draco thought. Nothing was the same now as it had used to be, except the fact that things were still completely shit. Things had been shit before, and things were still shit now except currently neither he nor Potter were in immediate danger of being killed. If Draco been feeling cruel he would have said all of that out loud, just to watch Potter’s face.

“Me neither,” Draco said instead. “You’re right. Neither do I.”

 

\---

 

In the spirit of things not being like they used to be, Draco went to talk to Weasley and Granger. He found them in the kitchens, eating bread and butter and talking to a small group of house elves who quickly dispersed when Draco made his entrance. They ignored him as he walked over, past the workbenches and long wooden side-tables where carrots were currently chopping themselves. They continued to ignore him right up until the moment he stopped directly in front of them and attempted a smile.

“Hi,” he forced himself to say. Weasley had paused with a thick slice of bread halfway up to his open mouth, and Draco wanted so desperately to laugh at him it was like a physical pain in his side.

“What do you want?” Weasley asked, because clearly his parents hadn’t taught him any fucking manners.

“I wanted to apologise to you,” Draco said, then looked at Granger. She didn’t seem pleased, but then again she never looked pleased any time she was within fifteen feet of Draco’s person. Apart from that one time she’d punched him, of course. She’d looked like she’d been having a bloody brilliant time _then_.

“Both of you,” Draco continued. He’d practiced this earlier in front of the mirror in the dorm showers, the way he’d used to practice apologies to his parents.

“Really?” Weasley said. He put his bread down onto the table beside a thick wedge of pale butter.

“I know it must be a surprise,” Draco told them, “but--”

Granger snorted. “What are you trying to apologise for, exactly?”

“Um,” Draco said, because somehow he hadn’t quite expected that they’d try to ask him questions. “For-- everything. For all of it, I suppose.”

“So when you used to call me a mudblood?” Granger asked coolly, her face implacable. She took a bite out of her piece of toast. Weasley flinched, next to her, but didn’t say anything.

Draco felt his face start to turn red. “I didn’t really know how--”

“Yes you did,” Weasley said, laughing for a second until it got caught in his throat. “Yes, you did,” he repeated, viciously. “You knew exactly what that word meant. Don’t try and pass it off like you were just some kid who didn’t know what he was saying.”

Draco swallowed, then he opened his mouth to say something, his jaw working uselessly. Granger didn’t let him. “You were a bully,” she said, raising her hand in between them, stopping him. “And as far as I’m concerned, you’re still a nasty little child who wants us to feel sorry for him because he picked the losing side in a war.”

“That’s not-” Draco said, even though he was starting to think maybe it was, actually, what he was doing. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t even remember why he’d wanted to apologise to them in the first place, except that he’d-- he’d wanted to. He’d felt like he should. “For what happened in my house, then,” he said.

Weasley got a murderous look on his face. Where he once would have, Draco didn’t back away. “Fuck off,” Weasley said, nodding his head towards the door.

“I know you’re angry,” Draco started, but Weasley cut him off.

“You have no idea,” Weasley said, his voice gone low and rough and awful. Draco could barely look at him. Draco couldn’t even _argue._ He couldn’t say _I lost people too,_ because he didn’t, he hadn’t. His friends hadn’t come back for eighth year but that wasn’t the same thing at all.

“I’m sorry,” Draco said helplessly. “I don’t expect you for forgive me. But I’m so sorry.”

“Well,” Granger said, slowly, coldly. She wasn’t even looking at him. “Now we know you’re sorry,” she said. “Do you feel better? I can’t say _I_ do.”

“Not really,” Draco told her, before he could stop himself or kick himself in the ankle or did whatever it was people seemed to do in order to stop themselves saying ridiculous things.

“I don’t want to look at you,” Weasley said. He picked his bread back up. Draco supposed the conversation was probably over. “I don’t want you to come near me, or look at me. Hermione?”

“Mm,” Granger said, leaning against him.

“So you can go now,” Weasley continued, then actually did a little shooing motion with his hand. Draco was almost impressed, since he’d utilised that motion before in much the same way. Weasley clearly hadn’t had the kind of practice Draco had had at dismissing people, though.

“Right,” Draco said, turning to leave. “See you around, Gryffindors.”

“Oh I really fucking hope not,” Granger said, to his retreating back.

 

\---

 

It snowed for three days straight, thick and heavy, and stuck firmly to the ground and the roof of the castle and the statues in the courtyard, and coated Draco’s bedroom window with a thick layer of ice. Everyone still had to go to classes, except for Care of Magical Creatures, which Draco wasn’t even taking. Even Herbology got moved from the greenhouses up to a unused classroom in the depths of the castle where the fires didn’t stay properly lit. Draco sat in his outdoor robes and shivered, while Professor Sprout delivered a mind-numbing lecture about the effects of snow on fireseed bushes.

Hogsmeade was out of bounds until the snow melted again, which it did after a while, leaving behind great big piles of muddy slush in its wake. The snow on the pathways got packed down further and further until it was awful grubby ice, and Draco slipped over a few times on his way across the west courtyard to his arithmancy class. Nobody had been around to see, he was pretty sure.

He saw Potter a couple of times, but always in the middle of a great big circle of Gryffindors, all chattering and laughing and shoving snow down each others robes. Draco went to the library early one morning before anyone else was awake and got out a whole stack of books, enough that he could write his next three Potions essays without going in for more.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Potter coming to his house.

 

\---

 

It got colder again after that, worse than before, too cold for it to even snow this time. The lake didn’t freeze over like everyone was saying it would, but it did get slushy around the edges, and there was a thin layer of ice creeping out from the shore towards the middle of it, way too thin to walk on. The water went completely still, dark grey and chilly and foreboding. Draco walked along the beach a couple of times, cracking the fresh ice underneath his winter boots; it was too cold for anyone else to have been out. He wondered what it was like for the merpeople down there, if they were cold. They used to come to the big underwater window in the Slytherin common room during winter and huddle around it, taking in some of the heat from the castle, but Draco hadn’t been down there since coming back to school. They’d set up a common room just for eighth years in the Ravenclaw tower and it was closer to his rooms, had better heating.

There was a nice place to sit and study if you didn’t mind the cold, just past Dumbledore’s grave on the western shore. Draco usually detoured around the tomb. He’d seen it once, right at the start of the year, and then didn’t want to go back again. Sometimes if he stayed too close to the path he could see it in amongst the trees, clear as anything, although not as well in this weather. He didn’t know why they’d made it white like that. It was gigantic too, bigger almost than the entrance to the Malfoy family tomb. Dumbledore probably wanted it that way, wanted people to be able to see it from a mile off. Draco was surprised it didn’t light up at night.

He was sitting in his spot by the lake when Potter found him again, too thin in a coat that didn’t fit him right. Everyone had come back from the war looking older, having grown wider or taller or having collected a couple of scars, but not Potter. Draco himself looked basically haggard, couldn’t get the dark circles under his eyes to go away no matter what he did, but Potter looked like a child. Like a third-year version of himself, back when he used to wear clothes that were too big for him and seemed as though he never sat down for long enough to eat a proper meal.

Draco watched him make his way over, rounding the trees with a surprised look on his face that he’d clearly spent a moment putting on before revealing himself. He had to walk up a steep bank to get to where Draco had put his blanket down, and steadied himself with one bare hand on the frozen ground, digging his boots in hard.

“Merlin,” Draco said, regarding him. Potter made it to the top and stopped, grinning. “Did you follow me out here?”

“No,” Potter said. He gestured at Draco on the floor, the red blanket he had wrapped around himself. “I was out for a walk and saw your whole setup. It’s kind of hard to miss.”

“You know I don’t believe you,” Draco told him.

“Believe what you want,” Potter said, dropping to the ground, sitting down right on the edge of Draco’s floor blanket.

“Don’t sit down,” Draco said. “You can’t sit down. I’m studying.”

Potter leant back onto his elbows, looking out at the lake, the mountains beyond covered with snow. The castle looked tiny from here, dark and craggy against the white sky. The Quidditch pitch looked to Draco a lot like the miniature one he had when he’d been small, with tiny players circling that you could make do whatever you wanted.

“I’m just resting for a minute,” Potter said. “I walked all the way around the lake.”

“What on earth did you do that for?” Draco asked. “Have you seen the weather? Apparently it’s going to snow again later. I heard it on the radio this morning.”

Potter rubbed at his brow, then pulled the hat he was wearing off his head, set it down into his lap. His hair was all sweaty against his forehead. Maybe he hadn’t been lying about the walk. “Yeah,” he said. “I heard. I wanted to get out before we were all trapped inside again.”

Draco had nodded a couple of times before he managed to catch himself. He wasn’t going to allow Potter to imagine he’d actually said something sensible for once.

“What are you out here for then?” Potter asked.

Draco looked pointedly at the book he had in his lap, and the pile of books he’d lain out on top of his empty satchel. “Studying,” he said. “And avoiding you. It’s literally freezing, which I assumed meant that you wouldn’t do the whole routine you’ve been doing, but apparently not.”

“What routine?” Potter asked, as if he didn’t know. “I’m not afraid of the cold,” he then said, redundantly. Although Draco supposed that must be true.

“The one where you corner me and try to engage in conversation,” Draco explained. Just the other day Potter had trapped them together on a moving staircase, because he’d wanted to ask Draco about the arithmancy homework. It still stunned Draco that Potter was even taking that subject. “Don’t you have anyone else to talk to?” he asked.

“Do you?” Potter muttered. Nobody else from Draco’s year in Slytherin had come back after the war, so Draco didn’t bother to deny it.

“I’m not a bloody _child,_ ” Draco snapped. “So I don’t know why you’ve somehow managed to assume responsibility for my entertainment. I talk to people all the time!”

“Mm,” Potter grumbled, and then stopped talking for one whole, blissful minute; enough time for Draco to have read one and a half pages of his textbook. “You talked to Ron and Hermione?” Potter then asked.

Draco snapped his book closed. “Yes,” he said. “But do you think, if you’re going to insist on staying, that we could maybe be quiet? Does that sound like a reasonable goal?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t talk to them again,” Potter said, brushing aside a patch of snow so that he could start ripping grass out of the ground by its very roots. Draco watched him do this for a moment with a feeling of extreme apprehension.

“I don’t think I will,” Draco agreed. He gave up, and placed his book on top of the stack. It had started snowing over the mountains, they had become almost completely obscured in cloud. It would probably reach where they were sitting, soon enough. “Granger scares me,” he admitted

“What did you try to say to them?” Potter asked.

“Surely they told you,” Draco said. “I thought you three were telepathically linked or something.”

“Well,” Potter allowed. “They did, obviously. I just wanted to hear what you’d say about it.”

Draco sighed, leant back on his hands, the blanket slipping off his shoulder a little. He didn’t bother to pull it back up. “I tried to say sorry to them,” he said. “It didn’t really go the way I’d planned it, to be perfectly honest with you.”

Potter stayed quiet for a moment. “Maybe you shouldn’t talk to them,” he said eventually.

“I already _did,_ ” Draco said, exasperated. “Where was this advice a week ago?”

“Maybe if you didn’t keep avoiding me,” Potter replied easily.

“Ugh,” Draco said. “Sensible suggestions only, please.”

Potter snorted. “I just think it’s too soon for you to be talking to them,” he said. “Even if-- even if it wasn’t anything mean.”

“What did they say to you about it?” Draco asked.

He thought that even if Potter had told him not to, he still would have apologised. It was the proper thing to do, his mother had always said so. Not his father, so much, for obvious reasons. Draco was worried that he’d only done it to feel better about himself, and wondered if that even mattered or not. Draco just felt-- awful. He felt awful about it, the things he’d said, done, the names he’d called Granger, which he’d meant at the time. And now he felt terrible that he’d meant them, terrible that he’d ever even thought of them. He hadn’t realised that-- He didn’t know that when Voldemort died everything would be different. Voldemort had been wrong about everything, about Potter, about the war, about the names. They’d all been wrong, Draco thought.

“Not much,” Potter said, which Draco didn’t think was quite true. They were always huddled together at the benches in the great hall, clinging to each other in the hallways. The three of them probably told each other everything. He wondered if they were sleeping together. Draco wouldn’t even be surprised if that turned out to be the case.

“Well I won’t talk to them again,” Draco said. “Unless I feel like being kicked in the throat by Granger.”

Potter laughed, and Draco couldn’t help himself from smiling. He rolled his eyes. “Hermione wouldn’t kick you in the throat,” Potter said, and laughed a bit more. “She’d go straight for the crotch, probably.”

“Merlin,” Draco said, and laughed with him, even though that was a genuinely horrific image. Potter tilted his head back, looking up at the sky, his breath coming in clouds of mist.

Draco looked at him. “Maybe I should apologise to you, too,” he said.

Potter sobered, his mouth twisting sourly. “Er-- no,” he said. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

Draco frowned. “I-- I am, though, you know. I never--”

“Don’t,” Potter said again, hunching himself forward. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine,” Draco insisted, his stomach hot, heavy. “I-- it’s not. You saved my life about--”

“I don’t want to talk about this with you,” Potter said, cutting Draco off, his voice gone gravelly. He was angry, vicious. Draco hadn’t heard him sound like that in such a long time. “If I’m going to talk about this with anyone, it’s not going to be you.”

“What does that mean?” Draco asked. “You’re the one who keeps coming up to me and-- I don’t know. Why are you even bothering if you don’t want to talk about it?”

Potter shrugged, his shoulders tight. “I don’t know,” he said.

“I want to say sorry to you,” Draco said. “I think that--”

Potter stopped him. “You don’t get to say sorry,” he snapped. “I’m not going to forgive you, so don’t fucking bother.”

“What,” Draco said. His heart was beating hard, like he’d just-- run away from something. Like he was back in the room of requirement, the girls’ bathroom, bleeding out. He thought he might be scared.

“I want to keep talking to you,” Potter said. “Be your friend. I think it would be-- good. I think it would be good. But we’re never talking about the war, okay? I don’t want to, not with you.”

“Okay,” Draco said, too shocked to come up with anything else. He didn’t know where Potter had come up with the idea that their being friends would end up being anything other than a complete disaster, but apparently Draco was willing to go along with it anyway. Draco hadn’t ever been the best at making decisions.

Potter breathed hard for a few moments. “Good,” he said roughly. “Let’s talk about something else.”

Draco let out a breath, a great big billow of white. It was starting to snow.

“I didn’t think you’d talk this much,” Draco said, and Potter laughed, a gasping thing, like relief. “I thought I’d be the one who couldn’t shut my mouth.”

Potter shook his head. He needed a haircut, it was too long at the back, spilling over the collar of his coat. A couple of snowflakes caught on his shoulders. “Let’s just be quiet, then,” he said, and sat back on his hands, closer to Draco than before.

They watched the snow come down over the lake, over them, sticking in the trees and on the bank in front of where they sat. They’d have to go inside soon. But it was nice for a little while. They could stay for a little while.

 

\---

 

Spring came around quickly, the snow finally melting for good, daffodils blooming in the courtyard and down beside the lake. Everyone spent several windswept weeks almost entirely outdoors, exultant at the chance to be outside in the mild air and the sunshine.

During their easter break Draco went back to the manor, while Potter, Weasley, and Granger disappeared off on some mysterious excursion that Potter wouldn’t tell him about. And then Draco was reading the _P_ _rophet_ one morning during breakfast and almost dropped the whole thing in his porridge; Theo’s father had been captured, sent to Azkaban, no further details were available. But it was obvious, everyone had to know who had done it.

Potter had a cut high up on his forehead when he came back from the break, and ring of bruises around his neck that hurt Draco’s head to look at. He wouldn’t cover them up, didn’t even seem to notice people staring at him in the Great Hall. Ginerva sat down beside him on the first day back, poked at his neck a little bit, and then spent the entire meal staring people down if they got too close. Draco declined to make eye contact, and only approached Potter in the library afterwards when they were by themselves.

On the third day in May, Draco caught a curse in the back while he was out walking beside the greenhouses. He didn’t see who had done it, and spent a few days in the hospital wing lying on his front and trying not to lose his mind with boredom. Potter visited a couple of times, bringing Draco books from the library he’d asked for, and sitting with him eating Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour and telling blatantly untrue stories about the time he’d caught Professor Sprout and Professor Trelawney kissing in a broom closet. They were horrifying, and Draco couldn’t even escape, being that he wasn’t able to move.

It was easy not to talk about the war when so many other things were happening. It was easy to talk about homework and classes and teachers and the weather and where they were going to go out drinking at the weekend. They didn’t have to even be careful, really. They didn’t have to work to sidestep around it. Draco almost forgot about the conversation they’d had, the way Potter had sounded, the way he’d looked. It was nice for something to be so simple, for once.

 

\---

 

Their final exam was a History of Magic paper that the entire eighth year had to take, straight after breakfast was over at eleven, and once the benches in the Great Hall had been cleared away. It had gone okay, Draco thought, on the walk back up to his room after they'd been let out. It wasn’t as though he’d had much else to do apart from study, and sometimes go down to Hogsmeade with Potter for as many pints they could fit in before their weekend curfew.

Draco sometimes longed to remind McGonagall that they were actually adults now, and probably didn’t need to be in bed by ten on a Saturday night. Also they’d fought in a _war_ -even though that hadn’t involved very much actual, physical fighting on Draco’s part- and he doubted anything they could get up to in Hogsmeade could compare to even the most relaxing days Draco had experienced during the past year. Of which there hadn’t been many, considering the house guest situation at the Manor, and considering the fact that plotting to kill someone, even if you were shit at it, was a pretty stressful pastime.

Most people went down to the lake after the exam had finished, to swim in the cold water and lie on the stony beach in the sun. Draco also suspected that there were barbecues involved, judging by the smells that wafted up into his bedroom through his open balcony doors. Draco hadn’t felt like going with them, mainly due to the fact that he didn’t feel like getting hexed, and went to his room instead to pack his things, just so that he would be prepared to leave at the soonest possible moment. For some reason classes were still running, even though exams were over, and Draco wasn’t allowed to go home until the leaving ceremony was done with.

His bedroom window overlooked a wide expanse of grey slate roof, along with a vast amount of turrets and flying buttresses and widow’s walks, but Draco could see a thin strip of water in amongst the crowded chimneys, and could hear people laughing and screeching out of sight. He could even hear the faint sounds of splashing, and longed for just a moment to go out there and dive into the water, to unstick his shirt from the back of his neck.

Draco went to sit down on his bed and stared at his trunk for a bit, half-open where he wasn’t able to close it properly. A few jumper sleeves were spilling out, probably just to taunt him. He took his shirt off, splashed some water on his face from the little sink in the corner of the room, and lay back against the mattress. He was probably going to get sunburned, without even the consolation of having been doing something so fun that you forgot to apply suncream.

Draco put his arm over his face, and resisted the urge to scream. The heat was making him weird, restless, eager to get up and leave and move to a city he’d never been to before and never come back. He resisted the urge, since school wasn’t over yet and he suspected he’d be in a lot of trouble for stealing away to a different country, as romantic as that sounded in his head.

Usually when Draco was hiding somewhere and feeling completely depressed and awful, Potter had a habit of finding him and dragging him off somewhere to do something boring, like a hike of some sort, that ended up being not really that bad because at least Draco wasn’t by himself.

And Draco hadn’t-- he hadn’t been waiting, exactly, but he did feel pretty relieved when Potter knocked on his door a few hours later, wet shouldered, and forced him down to the kitchens. Draco watched Potter assemble a plethora of horrifying sandwiches, did not participate in the actual eating of the sandwiches, and felt just a little bit as though he was going to miss Hogwarts after all. Not enough to feel sad about leaving, of course, but enough to feel as though maybe not everything about it was absolutely terrible. Then Potter dropped a piece of cucumber on the kitchen floor, proceeded to eat it anyway, and Draco promptly retracted his previous thought. He was embarrassed he’d ever had it in the first place.

The last day of school fell on a sweltering day mid-way through May, so hot that it almost made Draco miss the snow they’d had earlier in the year, as terrible as that had been. The leavers' ceremony took place on the front lawn, in stiff-backed, white chairs, with a brilliant view of the vegetable garden, and an even more brilliant view of the blinding panes of glass in the freshly washed greenhouses. Draco kept his eyes closed pretty much the entire time, through all of the speeches, right up until it was Potter’s turn to get on stage and say some more nonsense about how bright all their futures were. One would think that it would sound believable, coming from him, but that didn’t turn out to be the case. Potter mumbled his way through most of it, and became progressively sweatier as the minutes ticked by.

Draco’s parents didn’t come, of course, so he spent most of the afternoon by himself waiting for the Hogwarts express to leave later that evening. Potter had the Weasleys -and Granger’s parents too, Draco supposed- so he wasn't available for any last-minute pranks on the first years. Draco had actually stayed away from pranks this year. He didn’t think it would be a good look for him to go around chaining children to trees, the way he’d seen Lovegood and Ginevra doing earlier in the day. The third years in question looked pretty thrilled to be getting out of their last day of classes, but nevertheless, Draco had to think about optics.

Potter found him later that afternoon, after all the celebrations were winding down and people were starting to apparate away. Draco was lugging a suitcase along, halfway down to the station already, his trunk following behind him in the air. Levitating had never really been his strong suit, and he could only keep one thing up at a time.

“Hey!” Potter said, and Draco turned to him. He was jogging a bit to catch up, his dirty trainers thumping on the dusty path. The trees around them were green and bright, whispering to each other in the strong breeze.

“Hey,” Draco echoed. “Where are the Weasleys?”

Potter grinned. “Abandoned them in the Great Hall. Ron hasn’t even packed yet, so we’re waiting a while for our portkey out.”

“Oh,” Draco said. “Well. I’m getting the train.”

“I know, you told me,” Potter replied, looking over Draco’s shoulder down the path, where it extended further into the woods. The station wasn’t even in sight yet. “Were you just going to leave, actually?”

Draco sniffed. “I assumed you were busy,” he said. “It’s not like we’re ever going to see each other again after this.” As soon as he said it, he found himself hoping desperately that it wouldn’t turn out to be true.

“Don’t sniff at me,” Potter said. The wind was ruffling his hair, making the fabric of his t-shirt press close to his body. He was too thin. Draco always thought that, but didn’t think it was appropriate to point out.

“I’ll do what I like,” Draco said, even though he thought Potter already knew that about him. Draco did what he liked and he said what he liked and up until the beginning of this year he wouldn’t ever have let someone boss him around or make rude statements at his expense for the sake of a joke or drag him into the Great Lake in the dead of winter. But Potter had installed himself firmly in Draco’s life, and was apparently in the process of steering it in whatever direction happened to please him at any given moment. Part of Draco wanted to mind, or part of him felt like he should be distressed, but all he could think was that at least Potter was a good person, a kind person, and it wasn’t as though he was forcing Draco to _murder anyone_ or anything like that. He was just-- hauling Draco bodily into being a better person.

It must have been tiring for him, Draco thought absently.

“I wanted to ask you something,” Potter said, looking vaguely shifty. “But now you’ve just said you never want to see me again I feel like a bit of an idiot.”

“You _are_ a bit of an idiot,” Draco said. “But just-- ask me anyway.”

Potter took a deep breath. “It was two things,” he said, picking at the ragged bottom of his t-shirt. There was a large hole near the hem, through which Draco could see the dark hair on his stomach, and a half-circle of skin.

“Just _ask me,”_ Draco said exasperatedly. “I have a train to catch and I can’t stand around all day saying--” He cut off as Potter took a step forward, right into Draco’s space, so close that their toes were almost touching. Potter was wearing a pair of horrible brown sandals with big straps all over the place, that Draco found to be almost physically repulsive. He frowned down at Potter’s stupid shoes, and then looked up at his face. “What are you doing?” he said.

“I-- this, maybe,” Potter said nonsensically, and put his hand on Draco’s side, high up over his ribs where Draco couldn’t ever remember being touched before. Potter’s hand was warm through his shirt, light and tentative. Draco didn’t-- Draco couldn’t even _think._

“What’s _this_ ,” he said faintly, even though he didn’t really need to ask. He wasn’t-- he wasn’t stupid. His palms had started to sweat, and his heart was beating hard in his chest. He knew what Potter was doing, and the fact that Potter was doing it badly, ungraceful and awkward and slow, made Draco -impossibly- want it even more. He didn’t-- it hadn’t even _occurred_ to him what it might be like to have Potter kiss him, and now Draco was being forced to confront both the idea _and_ the fact that it might actually _happen,_ all within the next ten seconds, apparently.

Potter made a fond, incoherent sort of noise, and kissed Draco before Draco even had the chance to- what-- step away? To kiss him first? Draco wasn't ever going to know what he would have done, because Potter’s lips were soft underneath his, and Potter’s hand was still touching Draco’s body, and before Draco could stop himself he’d moved his own hand onto the back of Potter’s neck, where Potter’s skin was warm and a little sweaty.

They kissed closed-mouth for a long moment. “Merlin,” Draco said, pulling away all of a sudden, shocked almost into laughter, happy and helpless and god-- he wanted to put his hands on Potter’s chest, through his hair, onto his soft stomach. He didn’t even know what to _say_ he was so desperate for it, now that he thought maybe he could have it. “You’re trying to seduce me.”

Potter flushed deeply. “I-- have heat stroke or something,” he said, not even bothering to deny it. “I’m not thinking straight. And don’t fucking _laugh,_ god.”

Draco did laugh, properly this time, and then kissed him again. Potter opened under him straight away, shuddering against Draco like it was something he’d been waiting for, like he’d been wanting all this time to be kissing Draco’s bottom lip, to have his tongue hot and sweet against Draco’s own. Draco went desperate and shivery, and when Potter brought his hand up to cup Draco’s face, slid his palm down to Draco’s neck and ran his thumb over Draco’s hairline, it took everything Draco had in him not to just-- get onto his knees right there in the hot dirt.

“I’m not laughing,” he said, even though of course he had been, and let Potter kiss him once more, his lips, the side of his mouth, Draco’s red cheek. “Okay,” he said, stepping away. “This was a good idea, well done you, but I really do have a train to catch.”

“Oh yeah,” Potter said, although he’d gone from looking vaguely shifty to outright sheepish, and Draco couldn’t fathom why that might be. Unless he _did_ actually have heatstroke and was about to admit he’d thought Draco had been-- someone else, a girl, Lovegood maybe, there was a resemblance there that-- “Oh, right, yes," Potter said. "There was actually something else."

"Okay," Draco said. "You're being uncharacteristically mysterious, Potter."

Potter rolled his eyes. "Listen, you know how Hermione and Ron are moving into Grimmauld Place now that Ron’s got the Auror thing--” 

“I didn’t know that,” Draco said, which was actually a considerable surprise, since Potter rambled on about them given even the slightest opening. Draco had a list of subjects to avoid if he didn’t want to hear about Weasley and Granger on any particular day, which included but was by no means limited to: books, pie, quidditch, cars, hot chocolate, gnomes, and board games.  

Potter frowned. “Oh, well, they are. And I asked them to obviously and they said yes but I-- I really don’t want to.”

“Why not?” Draco asked. “I was under the impression you were starting some sort of home for stray Gryffindors after school was over. I heard Longbottom talk about using your attic to grow marijuana the other day in the bathrooms. Seamus Finnegan seemed almost suspiciously open to the idea.”

Potter laughed uncomfortably. “Yeah, I mean, a lot of people are moving in, which I’m obviously fine with because I asked them--”

“Except how you don’t want to live there anymore,” Draco finished.

“Except for that, yeah,” Potter said slowly, and looked at Draco significantly.

“Well you can’t move in with _me,”_ Draco said, sort of horrified. “I’m er-- planning on having a few renovations done over the next few months. We’ve been thinking about adding a third ballroom for quite some time, you know.”

In truth, Draco had no such intentions, nor did he have the kind of money it would take to repair everything that was wrong with the Manor. He’d been thinking of selling, actually. He hadn’t spoken to his mother about it yet, but he had the feeling she wouldn’t mind nearly as much as she once would have.

“No that’s-- no offense, but I’ve seen your house, Malfoy, and it’s in a worse state than Grimmauld Place,” Potter said.

“Um, fuck you,” Draco replied. He looked down at his wristwatch; the train wasn’t leaving for another forty minutes, so he couldn’t even finish this conversation under the pretense of being late. “The only reason you know that is because you called on me over the holidays.”

“Er,” Potter said, making a guilty sort of face. “I did, yeah.”

“So my house is an absolute mess, does it please you to hear me admit that? Every time I go back the place has acquired about thirty percent more ghouls.”

“That’s the point,” Potter said, “or like, that’s what I wanted to ask you about. Do you maybe-- It might be fun for us to find a place to rent for the summer, in London.”

“Fun,” Draco echoed faintly. “In-- I’m sorry, do you mean _together?”_

“Yes,” Potter said. “Me and you.”

“You and I,” Draco said.

“Perfect,” Potter said, rolling his eyes. He’d gone very red. “Yes that’s exactly the kind of thing I meant. Wouldn’t you have such a nice time this summer if you didn’t have to stop correcting my grammar?”

“I mean-- yes,” Draco said, shocked into honesty. “But-- we’d have to have Weasley and Granger over all the time. That wouldn’t be ideal. Also have you gone completely _mad?_ ” Draco couldn’t even fathom the concept of living with Potter on a permanent basis, being in the same house as him all the time, having mundane, prosaic conversations about whose turn it was to do the washing up or what to listen to on the radio. It sounded-- hellish, on one hand, and oddly appealing on the other. Maybe Draco was the one who’d gone mad. It was probably Hogwarts, something about it made you completely immune to reason after a while, he suspected.

Potter shrugged. “Think about it,” he said, so elaborately casual that it flipped right over into sounding absolutely desperate. Draco rolled his eyes.

“There’s absolutely no way,” he said, starting to pull his trunk in the direction of the station again. “We’ve kissed exactly _one time,_ you’re a crazy person.” Potter sighed and levitated Draco’s trunk off the ground for him, then started to amble off back to the castle.

“ _Bye_ ,” Draco shouted after him, and laughed for such a long time that he did end up having to run the last bit in order to catch his train.

 

\---

 

“Do you want to go to the beach?” Potter said, three days later when he turned up at the Manor on a shining black motorcycle. It stood there in Draco’s driveway, glinting up at him. Draco looked to Potter, who was wearing a leather jacket, and down to his own body, which was currently inside a pair of flimsy linen pyjamas.

“Um,” Draco said, blinking, “give me one moment.” He shut the front door and closed his eyes for a second. “Okay,” he said, three minutes later when he was outside with a pair of jeans on, still in the same shirt he’d worn to bed. Potter was down beside his motorcycle, fiddling around with the handlebars. He grinned when Draco slammed the door closed.

“Amazing,” he said, and seemed to actually think that Draco _was_ amazing, in his muggle clothes with his hair unbrushed and his hastily cleaned teeth. He’d kissed Draco, and now he’d turned up at Draco’s house to take him to the beach. Draco didn’t quite know what to say.

“I hope you know how to drive that,” he settled on, nodding towards the motorcycle.

Potter looked confused for a moment. “I drove it here, didn’t I?” he said, a statement with which Draco couldn’t argue. He smiled, handed Draco a helmet that he was going to have to _pay_ Draco to actually wear, and then kissed Draco for the second time ever.

“We could go inside,” Draco said, panting, when Potter sucked hard on the skin under his ear. “There are about fifty beds inside that house,” he continued.

“You’re being nice,” Potter observed.

“I’m always nice,” Draco snapped. “Shut up, get on your stupid bike.”

 

\---

 

The rest of the summer passed much in the same way. Draco didn’t really have anything to do, and Merlin knows _Potter_ didn’t have anything else to do, so they just-- did nothing together. They spent a lot of time in London: sneaking around Potter’s house so that Draco wouldn’t be forced to talk to Granger and Weasley; at the swimming ponds in Hampstead Heath with Greg and Pansy, dunking each other under the surface of the cold, still water; in the crisply-marbled, air-conditioned rooms of the British Museum.

They went to Dover and walked along the edge of the white cliffs, on a day so clear that they could see all the way across to the hazy coast of France, shimmering in the heat. Potter bought a car, sort of on a whim, Draco thought, and they spent a considerable amount of time driving around the countryside south of London, over a long white bridge and into Kent, where the fields were pocket-sized and full of waving, golden wheat, and where the beaches were packed with muggles, laying their blankets down over the burning sand.

“I went on holiday here once,” Potter said once, at some seaside town in the south. They’d parked in a sprawling, black-tarmacked car park and made their way onto a long, sliver of a beach, that led down to the bluest sea Draco had ever seen.

“It’s very-- hot,” Draco said, who had been sweating at the time, and wishing he could get back into the car.

“It was hot at the time, yeah,” Potter had said, and put his hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun.

“I’m saying it’s hot now,” Draco had replied absently, and gone to poke around in a little hut nearby that had sold red fishing nets and plastic kites and sticks of rock that said _St Mary’s Bay_ in little letters all through the middle. He’d bought Potter an ice pole, and went over to where he’d been sitting, on a wooden bench that had been warmed from the sun.

“Thanks,” Potter had said, and then hadn’t said anything at all for a few minutes until he slumped into Draco’s side, and leant his head onto Draco’s shoulder. A muggle family had looked over in a sort of scandalised manner, and Draco had put his hand onto Potter’s knee. “Thanks,” Potter had mumbled again.

“Well,” Draco had replied, looking out to sea, hot down to his _bones_. “It’s just an ice lolly, Potter. And I gave the old lady over there the wrong money for it then just walked away, so be prepared to do a runner if she suddenly realises.”

 

\---

 

Late in November, on what would turn out to be the last nice day of the year, Draco moved into an apartment in Crouch End with a small bedroom and a tiny galley kitchen and a huge, white-walled attic with high ceilings and dormer windows.

Draco had found it on one of his trips with the real estate agent into parts of London he’d never even seen before. Earlier in the day they’d parked on the street and walked up the big hill towards Alexandra Palace, to look at a two storey house with a tiny bathroom and no windows in the kitchen. It hadn’t been right, but Draco had been getting to the stage where he’d have to stop being so picky, pretty soon.

Then they’d turned a wrong corner and found themselves on a side street, in front of a golden bricked Victorian. The garden had been a mess, and the windows were jumbled around on the facade like they’d been thrown there. But Draco could already tell, from the stained glass above the door, from the tiny number two painted on the letterbox. He’d never wanted to own anything so much in his life.

He painted the kitchen and sanded the floors, and brought a claw-foot tub over from the Manor, shrunken down inside his pocket on the underground. Draco loved it, felt foolish about it, sentimental in the way he felt about his childhood bedroom, or his dorm in the Slytherin sleeping quarters, except that it was _his_ now and nobody else’s, and he could do whatever he wanted when he was there, and he never had to have anybody over that he didn’t want over.

“I’m in love with your house,” Potter said once, a couple of weeks after Draco had moved in. It had been raining outside in hard, heavy droplets that were loud against the window-panes.

“Hm?” Draco said absently, reading painstakingly through his job application. The bookshop down the road needed new staff, and even though everyone else that worked there seemed to be a series of elderly women, Draco felt good about his chances. He went in there a lot and he was always friendly, and he always bought something, even if he didn’t really need a new book.

“I’m in love with your house,” Potter said, and sank further down into the bath. He’d left the bathroom door open so that he could talk to Draco in the kitchen, and kept saying inane comments like _I’m in love with your house_ while Draco was trying to work.

Draco looked over at him. Potter sometimes wore his glasses in the bath, which Draco found to be more charming than anything else, which in itself was probably a warning sign of some sort. “I don’t blame you,” Draco said. “Your house is an absolute wreck.”

“It’s not as bad as all that,” Potter said, which was an outright lie. “Neville really spruced the place up when he brought those peace plants home from work.”

Draco yawned. “I’m still not letting you move in,” he said, putting his application to the side. It was fine; he’d hand it in tomorrow when he walked Potter to the tube station.

Potter frowned. “I didn’t ask,” he said grumpily.

“You’re gearing up to it,” Draco said, making his way over to the bathroom. He took his trousers off. “I can tell.”

Potter eyed him hopefully. “You getting in?” he said.

“It’s my bath,” Draco told him, pushing Potter’s legs out of the way. “You won’t hog the floor space, I simply won’t allow it.”

  


\---

 

With three weeks to go to Christmas, in Draco’s bed beside the window that overlooked the houses on the other side of the street, Potter said: “Would it be-- would it really be so bad if I moved in?”

“What?” Draco said, and stopped moving. He pushed his hair back out of his eyes. Potter wriggled against him with an experimental sort of air, and Draco put his hand on his bare stomach. “Don’t-- _yes,_ it would be bad,” he said, panting. “Why are you bringing this up now?”

“Can you--” Potter said, and put his hand on Draco’s hip, pushing him a little. “Can you move, Draco.”

“If you wanted me to move,” Draco said, but pulled out a little bit anyway, thrust back hard enough that Potter’s eyes rolled back in his head. He was so wet inside, so hot. “You wouldn’t have brought this up while we’re fucking.”

“I’m so close,” Potter said, blinking dazedly. He started wanking himself off. “I-- forget I said anything, actually.”

“Merlin,” Draco said, watching Potter’s hand around his dick, the warm brown skin of his stomach, his dark nipples. “You’re trying to--”

“Ah,” Potter said, a little gasp of air, a hitch in his throat, and came wetly onto his stomach in a few thick pulses. He moved his hand away, and gripped Draco’s shoulder. “What?” he asked, and then winced when Draco slid out of him. “Jesus, fuck, warn me.”

“Warn _me,_ ” Draco said, collapsing down on top of him, his hard-on pressed up against Potter’s hip. Potter flipped him over, and stripped the condom off. He licked the head of Draco’s dick, and pressed his tongue into the slit.

“Come in my mouth,” Potter said, eyes wide and dark, and cupped Draco’s balls. “I--” Draco said, and then did, helplessly, right onto Potter’s red, waiting tongue.

“You’re not moving in,” Draco said, after Potter was back from using the toilet, and had paused on the threshold of Draco’s room. “I know you love my apartment, but you can’t move in.”

Potter frowned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just--”

“I know you hate your place,” Draco said.

“That isn’t really what this is about,” Potter said solemnly, coming to lie down beside Draco on top of the covers. He slung his leg over Draco’s. “I just want to live with you.”

Draco took a deep breath. “Why?” he said. He wasn’t asking just to-- just to ask, just to be obtuse, he really didn’t know.

“I guess I just like you,” Potter said flatly, like the question was ridiculous.

“Why?” Draco said again, and this time he was asking just to ask, just to annoy.

“I-- don’t know,” Potter said. “I just do. Why do you like me?” 

Draco shrugged, his shoulder moving against Potter’s. “You have a nice dick,” he said.

“Oh is that all,” Potter said, laughing, and turned over onto his stomach. He looked up at Draco. “I just like you, and I want to live with you. If I-- I want to live with someone I’m choosing to live with.”

Draco felt very sad, all of a sudden, hearing Potter say that. “What about your plucky band of Gryffindors?” he asked.

“Yeah, I guess,” Potter said, and kissed Draco very softly on the forearm, almost so soft that Draco couldn’t even feel it. “Well, yeah, I guess.” 

“Potter,” Draco said seriously. “I’m not letting you move in with me just because you’re sad living where you are. And I didn't-- I shouldn't have said no so quickly the first time you asked, even though it was _insane,_ it's only that-- I can't.”

“I’m not _sad,”_ Potter said, aghast. “It’s just a bit--” he trailed off, lost for words. “There’s a lot of them” he said eventually. “There’s only one of you, and I really like you.”

“Potter,” Draco said, gentle. “I need a place for myself.”

“I get that,” Potter said. “I’m not trying to-- I know that you want somewhere that’s just for you.”

“And time to myself,” Draco said, his heart going fast. “I-- I need time to myself. I want to make decisions for myself and do things for myself and not have anyone here to--” he cut off. “Not that you’d tell me what to do, necessarily.” 

Potter was frowning. “I have been known to,” he said. 

“Yes,” Draco said. “You-- that’s fine. But not here.”

Potter swallowed. “Okay,” he said. “Of course. I’m sorry that I--”

Draco put his hand on Potter’s shoulder, stroked over the warm, slick skin, brushed his fingers up into Potter’s hair. “Don’t be sorry for asking,” he said. “I’m not upset that you asked.”

Potter curled in close, and tucked his head underneath Draco’s arm, his nose against the sensitive patch of skin where Draco’s arm met his torso. He breathed out a few times, hot against Draco’s side, making him shiver a little. It was warm in Draco’s bedroom; he’d had someone in to do special heating charms on the floorboards for winter. “Will you tell me if I’m fucking this up?” Potter asked after a while.

Draco’s heart clenched, started to sort of ache a bit inside his chest. “I don’t think you could stop me,” he said weakly, and then was silent for a bit. Potter nodded, his hair brushing against the underside of Draco's arm. “Will you tell _me_ if I’m fucking this up?” Draco asked.

Potter laughed then, ragged and helpless and oddly sad-sounding, like he'd been holding it inside himself for a while. “Yeah,” he said, and laughed some more, shifting himself more firmly against Draco's bare body. “I-- yes, Draco.”

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr here ;)](http://seefin.tumblr.com/)


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